Gentle Voice

Saturday, March 10, 2012

The Goldfish Is Now Talking!

My existential bearings have come to a screeching halt! And the road is littered with loose screwballs and nuts breaking apart from their bondage of enslaved servitude.
Its tempting to give way right away but I’m gonna milk this moment ‘cos really; the fleeting rare moments of clarity normally submerged wholesomely in murky waters is what a writer is. In a word, his life literally stinks! So when such a spontaneous miracle appears- you savor it! Even the Buddha sat and savored every moment of his supreme realization and the taste we can only read about or dream about- PariNirvana. He refused all calls and just stayed in that blissfulness- till the gods of the Hindu pantheon stated texting, emailing, smsing and twittering the peace out of his total sojourn!

Remember the goldfish that wouldn’t talk about its tanked existence much like the colorful chirpy canaries hosted in a gilded gold cage? Well I dunno about the canary; not yet but the goldfish spoke! It came as vividly and with as much candor and courage as that animated Nemo, Nemo’s Father and of course, I forget the name of the fish that forgets things! Dori was it? Anyhow it seemed as if the fishes in that dentist’s tank in that movie came to, and decided to come out clean with their fins and tell, if not everything, a story or two about keeping pets, limited space and that perennial question that keeps asking questions. Its been doing that since man walked erect (here our four-legged cousins are going, “Boy! Would you look at that drunk? As if it wasn’t hard enough balancing on two limbs, the moment the opposable thumb came to be they go making liquor, which invariably makes the balancing act all the more challenging?”

Word has also spread of the dishonorable qualities of the Homo Sapiens! From the savannahs of Africa to the twin arctic poles down to the rainforests, the deserts, and wherever Darwin held some esteem among the local inhabitants, as in the residents of the islands of Galapagos.
The goldfish asked what all creatures have been asking since we stood up some time back and managed to make the circus pose our own look of permanence- forever doomed to balancing the limbs and the walk- all the more confounded when in an inebriated state of existence asking questions related to existentialism when Ants are happy building anthills using the earth; birds are happy amongst their feathered lot in spacious skies; the fish wet and ecstatic in their watered universe and every other being is happy being who they are.

And then we did things they found plain ludicrous. The goldfish with the belly (yup- this one had a pot-belly!) asked me, in the fishian lingua fraca, just what the fvck was I trying to do? I answered nothing with a solid objective really and that seem to piss him off! He went ballistic! “What’s wrong with your species?” he asked, though it sounded more scornful and less concerned.
“You get a guy like Einstein and instead of having him diffusing anything that can blow; you put him in a lab and tell him to make a bomb that can literally wipe the shit out of this planet!” Now, he went on, if you wanted to give in to these inherent suicidal tendencies the homo sapien is generously blessed with then “be my guest” but man! This planet does not belong to you nor does the infinite universe that has no edge. You feel me? You understand the meaning coming out of my fish-lip and this fish-head? You are surprised that a goldfish in a tanked glass can see beyond the confines of what is just a mere fish stored in a mere glass? Do you even know the fact that a single blade of grass can hold the infinite cosmos within its grasp?

Do you know that your species have been around for just a fraction of the time the great dinosaurs have had? And do you know that this particular heavenly body we call Mother Earth has taken care of herself as and when required? And now you all talk about “Global Warming”- and since that was a little insulting among some of your peers, it had to be politically corrected and now you call it “Climate Change!?”

Look at your history! It’s littered with war and pettiness… never peace and wellbeing but anything to the contrary and yet you preach on about god and doomsday and hell and heaven and that thing that gets my fish-goats the most: the Pursuit of Happiness! Just what’s there to pursue my man? And if you are pursuing happiness or anything else for that matter, here’s news: be prepared to be disappointed! For every desire there is an equal amount of aversion. These are things the rest of us; from the tiniest of beings, to the biggest of mammals, have known and lived by as our code.
The one code of simplicity that simply boils down to this: eat when you are hungry. Sleep when you are tired. Go shit when the bowels go loose and do it all without labeling it as such.

There are many amongst you who have known what we have known and lived by for millennia. There was this guy called Siddhartha who became The Buddha. He’s left instructions for you to follow so that you can live as a good human being in harmony with his surroundings. But man! This is where you guys love becoming tormentors rather than mentors! Let’s see: Gandhi was shot. Ditto for Martin Luther King Jr. Christ was crucified. Joan of Arc was burnt. JFK was assassinated. Einstein is a hero for having made the bomb that gave birth to yet more bombs and congratulations!

You have accrued enough bombs to blow yourselves to smithereens! You worship moviestars and whatever’s on planet earth is divided like this: ^ - that’s a pyramid and all of you live at the bottom taking whatever scraps falls off the top.
But see this nonsensical structure! If you moved at the base the top hat would come crumbling down. But that’s never gonna happen because nobody loves Misery and Suffering more than You Do and when Misery and Suffering are together, there is always room for company. So you get the Corporations, Big Governments, this enslaving toy called trade that has been renewed as Globalization. In other words, your often-quoted expression of History Repeating History is still in the process of going through the repetitions. So as long as that is that, the results will not differ! It cannot! And now at the rate your are reproducing yourselves the time won’t be far when killing people will replace some of the non-vegetarian items on the menu.

It could be the scenario that you’ll have a casual exchange of “yup- I killed a dozen today! But boy do I feel good!”
Knowing your place in the grand scheme of things is the secret every creature on Earth comes embedded with and hence, follows that code. I cannot say the same for your species- you have forgotten not just the code but also the blueprint itself. Here’s a clue: The Buddha and Good Luck, You Pathetic Fvcking’ Homo Sapiens & Bring Me My Food! This goldfish is hungry! Until the next apocalypse, adios amigos!